Category Archives: Retro equipment

ham_convert 0.5 pre-alpha

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This version will support importing a 64-color palette from a text file (JASC palette file format). I decided to add it because some time ago IrfanView received a very good high-quality colour reduction algorithm which is better than ImageMagick‘s. It also can export the colour palette to a text file.
If you reduce the number of colours of your image to 64 in IrfanView by that algorithm and export the resulting 64-color palette to a file you will be able to import it to my program. That optimized palette will drastically improve the quality of the resulting HAM8 file. I’m also working on my own colour reduction algorithm, but it will be not as good as the IrfanView’s. I’m also experimenting with ImageMagick.
I posted some test pictures below. I took them in Warsaw, Poland.
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Fakemode (fake 18-bit hicolor mode)

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Fakemode (fake 18-bit hicolor mode) was used in scene demos and intros around 1995-1997 to display more than 256 colors on plain VGA cards when hicolor modes were still not popular and not quite standardised. It uses normal 256 color mode. Three rows of pixels are used to display each of the color component and on very old crt monitors they will blend into single row of hicolor pixels. That’s right – first line – shades of red, second – green, third – blue. Because VGA has only 64 shades of each component it uses only 192 (3×64) colors from the 256 color palette. The biggest drawback of this mode is 3 times lower vertical resolution.

Some examples: Gustar by Camorra, Transgression 2 by mfx, Bill G Force by Komplex.
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